Creatures of the Storm (7 page)

The cell phone made the decision for her,
bleeping from its holster on her hip where she wore it like a
small-caliber pistol. It was a call from – oh, God, Cindy
Bergstrom.

She tapped on the phone. “Yes?”

“Well, hey there, Dr. Armbruster!” Cindy
chirped. It was the single most annoying voice on the planet.
“Quite a little storm we’re brewin’ out there, eh?”

“Yeah,” she said. “What is it you want,
Cindy?”

“Oh, I was just checkin’,
y’know. Seein’ how things were goin’?” The last word came out more
like “goo-in’,” and there was a charming little diphthong in there
someplace. Cindy had been in Dos Bros more than seven years. She
had come here with her husband and her sister when they both got
jobs at VeriSil, but she still sounded like an apple-cheeked extra
from a road company version of
Fargo
. At this particular moment, it
was the last – the
very
last – voice that Lucy Armbruster wanted to
hear.

Maybe it was the rain, or
what Lucy knew the rain would bring. Maybe it was because Lucy
really was scared and lonely and didn’t want to admit it, or maybe
it was simply because she was tired, but the sound of that
relentlessly happy, insistently shallow, constantly demanding voice
made some small but important restraint in Lucy Armbruster’s head
go
pop
.

For the first time in a long time, Lucy said
what she really wanted to say. She said, “Cindy? How long have we
known each other?”

That took Cindy back a bit. “Oh… five years
now, Dr. A?”

“Six, actually, since you
came to join our happy family. And in those six years, I’ve learned
a lot about you. A lot. I’ve learned that your house in Lake Geneva
is exactly the same color as your house in Dos Hermanos.
Exactly.
I’ve learned
that your favorite yogurt flavor is pistachio, that you raise
African violets as a hobby but not very well, and that your
daughter Denise has a taste for her own fingernails. And I’ve
learned that you always,
always
speak in code.”

Cindy paused, as if she was swallowing. Hard.
“In…code, Doctor?”

Lucy was going up the hill past the SCENIC
VISTA. The single picnic table and drinking fountain in that
bedraggled flat patch of land looked even more pathetic than usual
in the iron gray light of the storm. Sunset would be coming soon.
Then things would get even worse.

“Yep,” she said. “CindyCode. Like, ‘Gotta
keep in touch with the family, y’know!’ means, ‘I’m about to make
another long-distance personal telephone call on company time.’ And
‘Whew! Boy oh boy! Down in Mexico, it’d be siesta time right about
now!’ means, ‘I don’t intend to do any more work today,’ whether
it’s morning or afternoon when you say it. And ‘So how are things
goooooin’,’ means, ‘Can I go home early?’”

“But… I …”

Lucy was at the wide driveway to the Station.
The modest wood-burnt sign on the left read,

TOMAS J. RIVERA

AGRICULTRUAL RESEARCH
STATION

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,
RIVERSIDE

No. 312

She slowed to a crawl and
turned in. Water was coursing down the gutter at least a foot deep.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said into the no-hands phone as she
turned, “Chances are you will get to go home early today. Hell,
chances are you won’t even be able to come in to work at all
tomorrow, and isn’t that good news? But you’ll stay in that damn
chair and answer the damn phone until I get back and damn well
decide that. And you won’t go any-damn-where
at all
until we’ve had a nice, long
conversation about Cindy Code, and about that highly innovative
‘come in late/leave early’ employee benefit you’ve built for
yourself, ‘cause, damn, girl, I’d like to start trying that out
myself!”

“But, Dr. Arm–”

“I’m here! I’ll be inside in two
minutes!”

She clicked off the phone with a single
decisive punch of her thumb, wishing for the millionth time that it
was possible to slam these things down the way you could a real
phone. She pulled the Civic into its customary spot right next to
the Station’s red All-Terrain Vehicle.

She was halfway out of the car when she saw
that the ATV was steaming. It stopped her cold.

For a long moment Lucy simply sat there,
barely aware of the wind whipping around her, shielded from the
brunt of the rain by the driver’s side door. It was clear as day,
even in the dimming light: wisps of steam were twisting off the
plastic cowling, only to be lashed away by the driving rain moments
later.

“Son of a bitch,” she said into the open air.
“Son of a bitch!” She climbed the rest of the way out of the car
and slammed the door as hard as she could, and heard something
crash and tinkle in the door.

She turned back for a moment, expecting to
see a crack in the window or a broken mirror. It looked fine. She
started to open the door again, and the pull-handle flopped
uselessly in her hand. The door didn’t budge. She would have to pop
it open from the passenger side if she wanted to get in.

Oh, great,
she thought.
Perfect.
Now the goddamn door is broken.

One more thing to worry about later. She
sighed bitterly and turned her attention to the ATV, ducking down
between the vehicles as the wind picked up.

She put her bare hand against the cowling.
The body-temperature rain hadn’t cooled it completely; it was still
warm. And there was mud in a dark brown rill along the bottom of
the chassis.

Lucy got down on her hands
and knees, not giving a damn about dirtying her best pair of pants,
and saw a thick layer of mud coating the undercarriage as well. Not
dirt or dust, sheltered from the rainfall, but
mud
, thick as a finger and still
glistening.

The goddamn thing had been run out into the
storm. That was clear as the new-potato-nose on Lucy Armbruster’s
face. It had been returned only moments before her own arrival, and
there was only one person at the Station with access to the ATV’s
keys who was stupid and arrogant enough to break all the rules and
go joyriding on a day like this.

One single, solitary, smart-ass son of a
bitch.

She stalked to the entrance without conscious
thought, the rain and all it meant momentarily forgotten. She swept
open the glass double doors with a thump…then stopped in her
tracks.

Cindy Bergstrom was sitting behind the
reception desk, wide-eyed and wary as a whipped dog waiting for
another whack. Lucy barely even remembered their conversation.
Standing next to her – or rather, half-sprawled over the corner of
the desk – was a tall, emaciated, gangling, hairy, patch-covered
creature with granny glasses and a walrus mustache. Fender, their
neighbor from across the highway. Lucy winced at the sight of
him.

“Hey, Doc!” Fender said, showing a crooked
double line of yellow teeth. “How about that weather, eh, man? I
mean, man, you know? He used the heel of his hand to sweep his long
graying hair back out of his face. “Man!”

Lucy looked dead-eyed at
her receptionist, asking the clear and unmistakable
question:
What in hell is HE doing
here?

Cindy understood perfectly. “Fender came by
to make sure we were all right,” she said breathlessly. “What with
the storm and, and–”

“Is Steinberg in his office or his lab?”

Cindy blinked. This was clearly not the
response she had been expecting. “Dr. Steinberg?”

Lucy clenched her teeth so hard it hurt. “Is
Steinberg in his office or his lab?”

Cindy swallowed. She was a round, wide
partridge of a woman with tightly curled hair and a face like an
Oslo hausfrau. “Office,” she said. “Last I knew.”

Lucy pulled a tight left and pounded through
the swinging doors towards the labs. She thought she head Fender
say, “Wow, what–” before the closing door shut him off.

I’ll get to him
later
, she told herself.
I’ll get to the BOTH of them
later
.

The Station was laid out in a huge “X” with
the reception area and lobby at the intersection. One leg was
administrative offices, one a series of small personal labs, and
the other two hydroponic gardens and terraria, along with storage
and server space. All of it had been built under the guiding vision
and direct intervention of Dr. Lucy Armbruster. It was all her
responsibility, her baby, her destiny.

And it was all about to come crashing down
because of one semi-psychotic, egotistical idiot with a permanent
hard-on instead of brains.

She would kill him. She would simply have to
kill him, there was–

A beautiful young black
woman came out of a side door marked COMMUNICATIONS and slammed
directly into Lucy. Papers went flying; the woman tried to skitter
back to keep her balance on her black patent high heels…and failed.
Her shapely rump, wrapped in a nicely fitted black skirt, made a
pleasantly meaty
thump
when it hit the cool green linoleum. More papers
flew.

For one instant Lucy considered simply
ignoring her and keeping on. Fortunately, good judgment prevailed,
and she stopped to offer her hand.

“Jesus, Rebecca, what are you doing?”

The woman gratefully accepted the help and
wobbled back to her feet. “Building up a really good workers’ comp
claim,” she said a little breathlessly. “How do you like it so
far?”

“You okay?”

“Fine, fine.” Rebecca Falmouth-Hanson, her
intern from UC Riverside, was twenty-two, brilliant, beautiful, and
obviously in the wrong place. Her skin was a light mocha brown; her
chestnut hair was loosely curled and cascaded down her back almost
to her waist. She had hazel eyes that made everyone, man and woman,
stop and stare. Narrow-shouldered, narrow-hipped, long-legged, and
with a brilliant smile that revealed equally brilliant teeth, it
had been obvious to Lucy from the day she interviewed her more than
a year ago that Rebecca was hideously overqualified for this
year-long gopher-and-grunt assignment. What was she supposed to
have said to a PhD candidate with qualifications like this? ‘Sorry,
too pretty? Too good?’ The Oversight Committee would have been on
her like a bird on a bug if she did that, particularly given Lucy’s
well-known “gender issues.”

What they didn’t know was that Rebecca
Falmouth-Hanson had “gender issues” of her own. For most of the
last ten months she had suffered through a painful and painfully
obvious crush on lumpy, gruff ol’ Dr. Armbruster, twenty years her
senior and of the same sex.

It made for a wonderfully ironic life, Lucy
had noted on more than one occasion, but she really didn’t have
time for it. Not now.

“I have to go find that idiot Steinberg,” she
said.

“You’ll want to see these first,” Rebecca
said, scooping up the escaped papers.

“It can wait,” Lucy said.

“It’s the satellite data on the storm. I
know–”

“Rebecca, it can wait.”

There was a sudden, deep, bone-rattling peal
of thunder from above and beyond the station, an unavoidable
reminder of how bad it was getting out there, and how quickly. It
made Lucy pause.

Goddamn
it
, she thought.
I get myself all revved up for a good ass-chewing, and
something always interferes.

“Okay. You have a point,” she admitted.
“What’s up?”

Rebecca handed her a photo from a
high-altitude weather satellite, one that showed only the widest
planetary view, from the North Pole nearly to the equator. There
was the North American continent, there the tail of Florida, there
the wide bulb of …

“Jesus,” she said. There was a spiraling
flower growing from the Gulf of Mexico, or was that the Gulf of
California? Its arms spread out across half the print-out, beyond
the edge of the image. “What are they calling this one?”

“Calliope,” Rebecca said. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
She passed across another shot, this one much closer to home.
“Biggest storm of the year so far, and the season’s just begun.
Winds topping one hundred twenty, centered north of Guadalupe
Hidalgo.”

Lucy had already moved on to a page of
figures relating to the storm and the resulting weather in northern
South America, the Isthmus, and southern North America. This one
was big, truly big, and it was being felt as far south as Brazil
and as far north as, well, as far north as Dos Hermanos,
California.

“The perfect storm,” she muttered.

“What?” Rebecca asked.

“Nothing. Never mind.”

It was a term she had
admired at first. It came from a good book, and it was a nice
metaphor in its own way, but she’d come to hate it more recently
for its constant, inaccurate reuse. Besides, she’d realized long
ago, there was nothing perfect about a storm. Perfection implied
something beautiful, something flawless and even admirable. Weather
wasn’t like that at all, not really. It was the brutal collision of
massive, often dangerous physical forces. It was messy and uneven;
weather fronts were crooked and turbulent battle-lines of
temperature and pressure that threw off swirls and currents, eddies
and anomalies that defied not only mapping but real prediction of
any kind. Hell, the entire field of chaos theory was created
because of the great, huge, dark, hairy, damnable, impossible
imperfection of the weather. It would never – it
could
never – be
conquered or managed, let alone controlled.

Here was a perfect example of that. The
high-altitude photography gave the event a smoothness, a beauty
that simply wasn’t real. In fact, this was really a huge, uneven
landscape as messy as a close-up of bad skin, full of low-pressure
pockmarks and high-pressure pimples. And the crater valley of Dos
Hermanos was the biggest, nastiest lesion of them all.